Krish Ramineni is the Co-Founder & CEO of Fireflies.ai, a platform that transforms conversations into actions. They provide voice assistant and transcription instruments which can be designed to automate your crew’s workflow.
What initially attracted you to pc science and machine studying?
My attraction in direction of pc science and machine studying was extra of a way to an finish. I began with an issue that I confronted in my very own life and thought of how I can resolve it.
That’s once I realized I wanted to study pc science and ML to realize it. I used to be very keen about constructing software program that might save time and increase productiveness.
I needed to have the ability to simply press a button and have some kind of magic occur that might influence tens of millions of individuals. And ML and pc science simply occurred to be these instruments that would assist resolve attention-grabbing issues and construct nice apps.
Earlier than Fireflies you had been a product supervisor at Microsoft, might you focus on how this impressed the imaginative and prescient behind Fireflies?
I labored with numerous groups at Microsoft, together with the Workplace, Skype, Bing, and NLP groups. One of many initiatives I labored on was known as ‘buyer voice,’ the place we had been capable of analyze and quantify customers’ in-app suggestions supplied via MS Workplace. This obtained me within the NLP facet of issues.
However what impressed me to begin Fireflies had much less to do with the merchandise I labored on at Microsoft than the variety of conferences I had. Again then, the widespread factor for everybody was simply to say, “Hey, add that to my calendar. Let’s schedule a gathering.” Simply doing conferences over and over grew to become my life, and I needed to vary that. I needed to make conferences extra productive and environment friendly; that was the inspiration behind Fireflies.
What number of pivots had been essential to land on the present system?
We pivoted 5-6 occasions earlier than attending to the place we’re in the present day.
Once I first met with my co-founder Sam, it was in faculty, and we labored on totally different hackathon initiatives. We did a number of inventive initiatives, equivalent to constructing drones, meals supply apps, and crypto wallets. That was initially only for enjoyable; there was no thought or objective to show that into an organization.
Our first severe foray into pure language processing was after we constructed a to-do listing that might robotically be generated based mostly on the conversations. For instance, suppose I messaged somebody saying, “I’ll ship you this by subsequent Friday” or “Let’s meet up for espresso tomorrow” on LinkedIn, Slack, or different messaging channels. In that case, Fireflies might detect if I or somebody I’m chatting with is promising to do one thing and add it to my to-do listing. I’d get up each morning and have a look at my robotically generated to-do listing.
It was a cool concept that grew to become our segway into this house. We constructed e mail extensions, chatbots, and Slack bots. Ultimately, we determined that voice is an enormous space we should always sort out.
Voice is a blue ocean as a result of you possibly can simply look again on the e mail you despatched two years in the past, however in the event you had a gathering two hours in the past, you in all probability would have already forgotten every little thing that was mentioned. So, it’s essential to report, transcribe, and make these conferences searchable.
May you focus on among the challenges behind constructing a 24/7 tradition for software program that’s worldwide in scope?
The primary problem is getting individuals to work throughout totally different time zones, so we now have to rent throughout many international locations. We’ve constructed a remote-first, global-first group with a 24-hour presence as a result of individuals have conferences across the clock.
At the moment, we’re nearly 100 individuals throughout 15 international locations in a number of totally different time zones. Regardless of once you log in, work is at all times taking place at Fireflies. There’s at all times some degree of overlap and handoff between individuals. Completely different teammates are working at totally different occasions from totally different areas.
What are among the core functionalities which can be at present supplied by Fireflies?
There are literally rather a lot.
We are able to transcribe notes at very excessive accuracy, then generate assembly summaries. We are able to additionally instantly present the motion objects, questions, and dates and occasions mentioned throughout calls with one click on.
We are able to robotically log the assembly notes inside your core functions like CRMs, venture administration techniques, Slack, and Notion. We’re additionally capable of analyze calls to supply totally different insights, equivalent to how a lot you’re speaking, what number of filler phrases you employ, and how briskly you’re speaking.
Our core objective is that will help you assessment a one-hour name in lower than 5 minutes
What are some examples of how Fireflies makes enterprises extra productive?
Fireflies is extraordinarily precious for capturing your group’s voice and constructing a data base round it—that’s enterprise-level worth proper there.
In contrast to Wiki paperwork and different stuff that get stale over time, your voice conversations are at all times self-updating. Fireflies helps create a data base to your whole group.
It’s a self-updating data base that helps you seek for any data you need to learn about your clients, the voice of your clients, the voice of candidates you’re hiring, the voice of your colleagues, and what’s being mentioned in conferences and important subjects.
The opposite factor is Fireflies robotically fills out your CRM (and different apps), making you extremely productive. It additionally makes you extra educated and personable, permitting you to do fewer administrative duties, concentrate on the conversations, and be extra current in conferences.
Fireflies is engaged on releasing a bunch of recent options, might you focus on some what’s at present on the roadmap?
We hope to assist a number of languages quickly and have simply rolled out the video seize and recording characteristic. We just lately launched channels so you possibly can manage your conferences throughout many alternative departments extra succinctly.
We’ve many extra thrilling issues on the roadmap. We’ll additionally provide a world search quickly, which implies you possibly can search throughout your whole conferences, not simply inside a person assembly. However I’m actually thrilled about international languages as a result of that naturally will be capable to open up the market exponentially to extra individuals.
What’s your imaginative and prescient for the way forward for work?
My imaginative and prescient for the way forward for work is that we’ll have a number of workflow automation and instruments to auto-complete duties in order that we are able to spend extra time on value-add stuff moderately than mundane, repetitive duties.
There are nonetheless so many organizations the place persons are copying and pasting the identical kind of issues into totally different spreadsheets, transferring recordsdata, and doing a number of tedious, low-value organizational duties.
I feel a number of these repetitive jobs will get automated, and other people could have an opportunity to work on extra inventive, value-add stuff uniquely positioned for people.
Fireflies has succeeded in rising exponentially even with little or no advertising and marketing spend, what do you attribute this success to?
We constructed a product-led progress firm, that means we begin with the tip customers in thoughts, and that’s how adoption grows over time. We’re very clear—our pricing is on the market on the web site.
We scale back friction; any particular person, whether or not a single advisor or a thousand-person group, can get began shortly. We’ve a freemium plan that anybody can strive utilizing the free trial of our enterprise tier so that folks can use it, expertise it, perceive the worth, and swipe their bank card afterward and pay for it.
Conferences are additionally naturally viral and Fireflies displaying up on these calls helps begin an awesome dialog and will get extra individuals . Or when the members obtain the assembly recap afterward, they’re like, “That is superior. I wanna join Fireflies.”
Is there anything that you simply want to share about Fireflies?
I feel it’s necessary to grasp how costly conferences actually value and the way a lot time is wasted in conferences. In accordance with a survey, 40% of individuals mentioned their conferences are unproductive. They’ve so many redundant conferences that would have been emails.
Organizations are losing 20-30 billion {dollars} value of cash in having conferences. While you get 5-6 executive-level individuals for a gathering, that’s extraordinarily costly by way of the time and alternative value of what they may have been doing in any other case.
We’ve an enormous mission of creating conferences extra productive, which could possibly be value billions of time and power saved, and serving to organizations make higher selections.
Thanks for the nice interview, readers who want to study extra and take a look at out some unbelievable enterprise AI instruments ought to go to Fireflies.ai.
